Pope Francis's Humble Moral Exemplar

By Daniel Baird
The Toronto Star
December 8, 2013

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/12/07/pope_franciss_humble_moral_exemplar.html

Francis is the first pope in more than a millennium not to take on the name of one of his predecessors

Last February, while living in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a remote and nominally Muslim former Soviet Central Asian Republic, I remarked, on the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s unprecedented resignation, that there was nothing the Catholic church could do to repair itself in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal. The church, it seemed to me, had lost anything like the kind of moral high ground it needs to stand on, and the Vatican was on its way to becoming like the British monarchy: a decorative but ultimately powerless and irrelevant relic.

That was before I knew the church was about to elect the Jesuit Bishop of Buenos Aires, whom some called the “Bishop of the slums,” as the first non-European to ascend the throne of Peter.

From the moment of his election in March, the reign of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, has been unusual. He is the first pope in more than a millennium not to take on the name of one of his predecessors, allying himself instead with the radical St. Francis of Assisi, a saint known for his intense identification with the suffering, the despised, the dispossessed and the destitute. Pope Francis clearly intended upon being a pontiff concerned more with the poor and the vulnerable than with Church doctrine and canon law.

Thus far he has lived up to the promise of his chosen name. On his first week in office, Francis washed and kissed the feet of non-Catholic teenage offenders from Rome’s Casa del Marmo detention centre, exhorting them not to let themselves be robbed of hope. In July, on a flight between Brazil and Rome, he held a casual press conference in the back of the jet where he insisted that the church must embrace gay people and all those whose wills are good, shifting the focus away from ridged doctrinal conformity of the kind advocated by John Paul II and Benedict XVI toward basic and simple human goodness.

On Nov. 6, Francis waded into the throngs in St. Peter’s Square to kiss the face of a hideously deformed man, mirroring a pivotal moment in the life of St. Francis when he lovingly embraced a leper on the road to Assisi. And now reports are leaking out of the Vatican that the pope has taken to stepping out of Vatican City at night dressed in the guise of a lowly priest and visiting the homeless on the streets of Rome.

While John Paul II, whose canonization is imminent, was a charismatic, theatrical figure, self-conscious about the role he was playing on the world stage, Francis’s style is more intimate, humble and pragmatic, concentrated on empathy and goodness rather than grace and redemption. And with the publication of his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelli Gaudium, the pope has managed to draw the ire of the North American right. “Pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope,” Rush Limbaugh raved.

Evangelli Gaudium, which means, “Joy of the Gospel,” is hardly an anti-capitalist tract. Rather, it is at least in part a warning about the moral and emotional damage inflicted upon all of us by living in affluent societies in which grave poverty and dizzying economic inequalities are steeply rising. “To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed,” he writes. “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us.”

No Pope can single-handedly change the fortunes of the badly damaged church; what Francis is doing is changing the question from the church itself to the immediate moral issues facing each of us. So far Francis is presenting himself as a humble moral exemplar that is in the end more humanistic than it is theological. It is also as familiar as it is rare. Mahatma Gandhi rejected violence because he believed violent acts poison those who commit them, for whatever reason; Nelson Mandela, whose death on Thursday sent shock waves around the world, promoted the reconciliation of enemies because he grasped the terrible human cost of revenge.

Francis doesn’t pretend to be a figure on the mythic scale of Gandhi or Mandela, but he has arrived on a world stage in which the moral simplicity and truthfulness of those leaders are in short supply, and anyone who can begin to move us from the deadness of the culture of prosperity to a culture of empathy and goodness is, well, a godsend.